


After the Sea Change (The Vaster Than Empires Remix)

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Computers, Cyberpunk, HEX - Freeform, Happy Ending, M/M, Post Gauda Prime, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 01:10:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6778924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Federation cybersurgeons and Orac offer Avon the opportunity for a rather rosier, more infinite and far stranger happily ever after than he'd ever thought to look for. </p><p>A hex remix of Elviaprose's "<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/4923151">The Doors of Perception</a>".</p>
            </blockquote>





	After the Sea Change (The Vaster Than Empires Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Doors of Perception](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4923151) by [elviaprose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose). 



> beta'd by aralias
> 
> A hex remix of Elviaprose's "[The Doors of Perception](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4923151)".

**After the Sea Change**

A hex of “The Doors of Perception”

 _Full fathom five thy father lies;_  
_Of his bones are coral made;_  
_Those are pearls that were his eyes;_  
_Nothing of him that doth fade,_  
_But doth suffer a sea-change_  
_Into something rich and strange._  
—The Tempest 

***

Being a post-human machine intelligence wasn’t nearly as much of an inconvenience as Avon had expected it might be.

Avon had known that Orac’s vast perceptual capabilities were organized by some intelligence even when its human interface wasn’t activated: that its activities were directed, and thus meaningful. If Orac had just been a series of sensoria, a search function or a bank of information, the computer wouldn’t have conducted any ‘researches’ to speak of. Without a consciousness, Orac could have made no conclusions, and felt none of its evident fascination with the universe. ‘Orac’s’ witnessing the infinite would have been as immaterial as an atom of hydrogen not consumed in a star-birth’s ‘witnessing’ that event. Thus while Avon hadn’t fully understood what form his own consciousness would take, slipped from Orac’s human interface mode, he had understood that such a thing as ‘his consciousness’ would still exist within Orac’s unfettered vastness. And, naturally, he would still have backdoor access to Orac’s interface on various levels, should something go awry.

Avon was surprised, however, by the extent to which his new consciousness was like his old one. Before he’d made this transition, Avon had told Orac that it was a peculiar twist of the fully human mind that it generally wished to remain fully human. Orac had agreed, stating that, for this reason, it had simulated Avon’s inconsequential, limited mind for him within itself. It seemed that Orac had in fact understood this, understood _him_ , well enough to preserve what of Avon was Avon even now. He didn’t dissolve, like a glass of water poured into the ocean. He slipped through the ocean like a fish, or rode over it like a sailing ship, to see everything the ocean could touch. He had something of a self, and not just _a_ self: his own. He retained his memories, and recognized his perceptual experience and his thought-patterns well enough. Thus he was ‘Avon’ still, in the senses that mattered to him.

Avon was now able to slip between pure consciousness and an ‘embodied’ form, housed in one of Orac’s perfectly-simulated environments. He’d experimented with that process of exchange, thinking that he might at times wish to remember his body—out of sentiment or nostalgia (he knew himself to be vulnerable to both, in his own way), to obtain a different point of view, or to ground himself.

In some respects, Avon had never wished not to be human. He knew that this was quite a common fantasy of people in his former profession, but actually it did little for him. To yearn to escape the bounds of the body and the self was to pine for a kind of death. Death came cheap and easy in the Federation, and Avon had, in contrast, sought survival. For all Avon had wanted a rational control over his own passions, the prospect of not _having_ passions in the first place had limited appeal for him. Why not get a mindwipe, or expose yourself to Pylene 50, if such was your intention? He’d never told Blake his feelings on the matter, but he thought Blake had probably worked it out for himself (and even approved of it—this being, after all, a point on which Avon suspected they were very much in agreement). Blake, in turn, had consistently impressed Avon with both the strength of his passion and his degree of focus and control over his emotions.

Avon managed not to think of Blake—that often. No. That was a lie. Now that he could track his consciousness minutely and make an account of himself, Avon knew _precisely_ how often some other, tangentially related thought suggested Blake to him, and it was—often. (It was embarrassing even now, when there was no one but him to know it.) Avon supposed that he couldn’t have excised _that_ perceptual tic and remained himself. Besides, he probably owed Blake remembrance, both in the way of penance and as anyone owed the beloved dead as much. Given his current condition, he stood to remember Blake longer even than history would: to bear the memory as a source of pain and consolation into eternity. It seemed appropriate, as murderer and admirer, that this was his office. He took a kind of tender possession of the responsibility (even as he knew he couldn’t have escaped it had he wished to).

More pragmatically, Avon ran experiments, defining the parameters of his afterlife. After he’d felt out his new form (a process which had seemed to him to take—days, weeks?), he came to realize that time wasn’t passing quite as he had imagined it was. In fact, very little ‘time’ had elapsed at all. Avon consulted Orac, and in a flash learned that time would only pass for him at a rate consistent with his birth universe’s pace when he interacted with the material substance of said universe. Otherwise Avon’s perceptions worked in accordance with Orac’s high-speed processing capabilities. Looking in on ‘his’ material universe, Avon discovered he was still within a _day_ of the fateful reunion that had cost him and everyone he cared about their lives.

Avon was enough himself (he felt perhaps more himself than he had for over a year, given that as a living man, he’d been a prisoner of a body and mind decaying under stress and fatigue—a system breaking down) to be interested in what became of the bodies of his former crew, and… Blake. These were, after all, people who had, in their turn, preserved his life. People who had cared for him, and who he’d cared for in recompense.

Avon didn’t know whether he could exert any influence on what became of them. Probably not: a program couldn’t bury the dead, and nothing at all could bring them back to organic life. But he felt he owed it to his former crewmates to at least witness the outcome of his own actions, since he could offer them nothing else.

***

Avon had intended just to watch the disposal of the corpses—if Orac could show him a starbirth, as advertised, then it could show him this. But as Avon observed the troops at work, he realized that something more interesting than a routine mopping-up operation was in progress. The Federation, having planned a sophisticated sting operation on Blake’s base, had now moved in with commensurately sophisticated clean-up personnel. According to the orders stored in a computer that Avon used Orac’s capabilities and his own familiarity with similar systems to sift, these operatives were in fact _harvesting_ Blake’s brain for a full scan.

Now there were several types of brain imaging. The simple picture a doctor or torturer would use to diagnose flaws and weaknesses was a relatively crude thing, no more a copy of a mind than a photograph was a person. The detailed analyses a psychostrategist might make use of, taken together, comprised a more sophisticated model. But a full scan, taken from a living mind or one accessed within the first forty-eight hours following brain death, was an invasion of a different order. It was a copy of perceptions and memories so sophisticated that one might use it to create a clone that didn’t know it was one. Or, if one didn’t require that sort of interface, one could simply access the memories directly by storing such a copy on a (vast, intricate) computer.

It took skilled people to make the image. It took skilled people even to read the data. It took a prohibitive amount of time and resources. The Federation would only have done it for Blake—no, perhaps that was unfair. Perhaps they would have made the exception for Avon, and possibly for some of his crew, but then Avon had not been supposed to _be_ on Gauda Prime. And so the Federation had only brought the supplies and personnel necessary to copy one person. By the time they could have shipped the additional materials the technicians would need to make any further scans to Gauda Prime, the brains of Avon’s companions would be degraded beyond saving. 

Instead it would just be Roj Blake who they harvested. Blake, whose defenseless mind contained more information about anti-Federation activity in its various forms than any other. Whose killer had, in his wild abandon, forgotten to be practical or merciful. Whose killer had neglected to shoot Blake in the _head_ , sparing Blake both the pain of a long death and the final humiliation of having betrayed what he cared about unwittingly, helplessly, in this manner.

Avon could not let that stand. He owed it to Blake to stop this process, a violation that was only possible at all due to Avon’s own mistake. For three years, there hadn’t been a moment when he wouldn’t have died for Blake. Then, in an instant’s flickering failure, Avon had been so overcome as to allow himself to believe impossible things that had contradicted both his reason and his heart. Avon didn’t blame the tragedy on his mortal frailties. It had been an inhuman sort of failure: Avon had allowed the circumstantial evidence of the moment to draw him to a conclusion that contravened his deeper judgment and the account of his feelings. A justice computer might have come to Avon’s decision; a man shouldn’t have, let alone a man who had loved Blake.

And Blake _was_ his, if he was anyone’s at all. The Federation had no business carding through his neural impulses and ferretting out his secrets.

...but then, Avon considered, they might just have given Avon a wholly unlooked for opportunity, _mightn’t_ they? Avon fetched from Orac a full description of the differences between what the Federation intended to do to Blake and what Orac had done to _him_. These were significant, but not insurmountable. After all, even without any intervention from he and Orac, this richly detailed scan of Blake would be almost as much the man in question as he himself was Avon. The similarity between the processes meant that the Federation’s work could act as a bridge, an open door Orac could slip through. Orac couldn’t do what it had done to Avon for a dead man, or for anyone who wasn’t touching its casing, but the _Federation_ could stabilize and start to draw up those patterns, couldn’t they? And then, Avon surmised, Orac could take it from there. At that point it would be, as Orac might put it, simply a matter of over-riding a less sophisticated computer.

And then Blake—need never have died. If Blake consented to live on as Avon did, then Avon’s crime would become something not insubstantial, but far, _far_ less terrible. Logistics put an end to any ideas Avon might have entertained about generating somewhat implausible false orders about scanning the whole company, but it might not be too late for _him_.

And Avon—might have Blake. He was beginning to suspect that he’d welcome a companion in his new existence, but the possibility of having Blake was—Avon didn’t want to think about it. He wanted to spare himself the shattering possibility of disappointment, because so much might go wrong. He’d take it step by step. He’d frame the idea for Orac. (The mechanism that made him a discrete creature within Orac also granted him autonomous processing, and with it a distinctness of mind and a privacy that Avon appreciated. Thus Avon’s thoughts weren’t always already known to the machine, and needed to be conveyed.) Then he and Orac would see how it might be done, and whether they could actually manage it.

And then, when he could, Avon would speak to Blake. Because Blake’s _consenting_ to the transformation was vital: Blake wouldn’t appreciate being saved in this fashion against his will. The prospect of the conversation both made Avon sickeningly anxious (they would, of course, have to talk about why Blake was in this position in the first place) and gave him a thrill of anticipation. Blake being alive _to_ hate him was a delicious prospect.

But Avon was reasonably sure that Blake _would_ allow this. Blake had sometimes surprised him with the sudden, unanticipated turns of his thought, but in general, when it came to this sort of decision, they had always understood one another. Blake was as practical as he was idealistic. Blake saw and took his opportunities. Blake, like Avon himself, was a survivor. He would probably see in this mode of existence all the chances Avon had seen, and more besides.

Orac grumbled when Avon laid the suggestion out to him, and Avon was uncomfortably aware that he was no longer able to just order the machine about (to the extent he ever had been). But Orac was also not disinterested in this particular intervention, either as a technical challenge or in terms of its aim. Avon pointed out to Orac (perhaps unwisely, given how much he wanted this operation to succeed) that Orac’s compliance wasn’t entirely surprising, given that it had always been more biddable for Blake than for him.

Orac gave the mental equivalent of a dismissive snort at that, but rather at the pointlessness of the observation than because it wasn’t true. Orac’s personality interface and the structure of its consciousness were based on Ensor’s mind (even if its consciousness had subsequently vastly developed itself in inorganic directions), and Ensor had been a little too akin to Avon for the machine to like Avon (as much as it could be said to like anyone) without reservation. Blake, however, had provided Orac with interesting research questions. Blake had attempted to rescue Ensor, _had_ rescued Orac, and had carted Orac about the universe, giving it new things to look at and look into. True he had interrupted Orac’s pure contemplations, but the problems Blake had set Orac were unique, ambitious experiments in the material world: things which appealed to Orac, which it wouldn’t have thought to do itself, and which interpreted its capacities in surprising new directions. Orac resented Blake’s brusqueness and peremptory hand not at all. After all, it hardly thought its own rudeness remarkable or inefficient. Why should Blake’s be? Besides, Orac observed, analysis suggested that Avon also preferred Blake to himself—why, then, was the question of significance?

In his thoughts, if not with his mouth, Avon laughed.

***

“Well, Blake,” Avon said, or possibly sent. He wasn’t sure what to call it, given that he wanted neither to be pretentious about the cybernetic element of what was, essentially, having a conversation, nor to pretend pathetically to a kind of unchanged organic existence. “How do you feel about post-humanity?”

Even before Blake answered, Avon felt how good it was just to speak to him again. Orac had brought enough of Blake into itself that they could have this conversation, but the perfect simulacrum Blake’s consciousness was currently speaking through could be erased or discarded if Blake rejected the offer. If he did, Avon would _want_ the empty shell (perhaps endowed with a few lingering traces of the man’s personality—a dead thing frowning Blake’s frowns at him, no longer animated by the man himself) gone immediately. Avon would then have to try and forget that it had ever been. In the parallel universe Avon had visited immediately after dying, he’d been unable to bring himself to touch a Blake who didn’t know he existed. Even looking at him had felt illicit. The prospect of toying with a Blake-doll repelled Avon. At least … it did at the moment. Avon hoped that time and isolation didn’t eat away entirely at his self-respect, and with it that sort of scruple.

Avon had instructed Orac to bring Blake around in something that was recognisably his own healthy body, and to put the two of them somewhere comfortable and familiar. For him and Blake, that meant the Liberator—the last place Avon had properly thought of as his home. He thought (he _hoped_ ) that the familiar trappings would acclimatize Blake to the change. That would make what Orac was offering seem comprehensible, rather than radically other. _That_ would make Blake more likely to say yes. And Avon so wanted him to want this. In a way his proposal did feel—embarrassingly intimate. He was asking Blake to be with him, and only him, forever. Blake needn’t know how closely such a suggestion aligned with Avon’s longer-held desires concerning Blake. What mattered was that Blake would be preserved.

And even if Blake said no—to spite him, or because Blake couldn’t bear the thought of living on like this—Avon would at least have the opportunity to apologize, and to say goodbye properly.

“How do I _feel?_ ” Blake said.

He laughed, not pleasantly, and Avon, once more at the mercy of his body due to inhabiting this simulation thereof, tensed.

“First things first,” Blake began grimly, and he launched into a withering commentary on the day’s events; Avon’s supposed failure to look for him (where the _hell_ had he been these past years, Blake had _waited_ for him, etcetera); Avon’s abiding, selfish, stupid, _blind_ hatred of him: all of it. Avon took it.

When Blake had exhausted himself, Avon nudged him on the points he’d been unfair about, reasonably sure that Blake already knew he had been.

Blake, Avon countered, was a fool, and his plan to recruit rebels while disguised as a bounty hunter doomed to _just_ this sort of misunderstanding. Of course Avon had _looked_ —how dare Blake suggest otherwise. If Avon had ever despised Blake, Blake would certainly know about it, and they would hardly be here now, would they? And Avon was sorry. Avon was immeasurably sorry. Avon knew that if they were to apportion blame for the massacre, the greater weight would rightly fall on him. All he could offer was his genuine contrition—and this.

Avon outlined the terms. Blake asked good questions. Did better than he had done—though Avon had been bleeding out, so he cut himself a little slack on that front.

“You would, of course, remain yourself, in an appreciable sense,” Avon pointed out calmly. Or rather his tone was calm. Actually, Avon was balanced on a knife-edge of anxiety, and _that_ made him feel an inch away from making an irrevocable mistake. He _wished_ he knew Blake’s mind. It would have prevented the accident in Blake’s base, for a start. But beyond that, he wished they were better at making themselves understood to one another. He wished Blake could parlay his trust and he could make his love into an absolute understanding that would resist all attempts at confusion, and could admit no suspicion, no apprehension and no doubt.

“As I have done.” He smiled coldly, not letting his voice slide into the coaxing register he wanted to employ—he’d no business trying to seduce Blake into staying with him, so soon after having tried to kill him. “It’s hardly worth witnessing the infinite if you are not yourself while you witness it.” And Blake would help this remain true for Avon, for the both of them—provided, of course, that he agreed. There was no one better suited to reminding Avon of who he was: no one more capable of helping or forcing Avon to be the version of himself he wanted to be. Blake was his compliment and his contrast. Avon had known that almost since they’d met.

Blake asked some pointed questions about their ability to interact with the physical world that made Avon think he already had plans for the possibilities of their new form. That fast—how very _Blake_ of him. Oh, and the drift of Blake’s questions was definitely hopeful. If Blake was thinking about how to use this, then he was at least a little swayed. There was no lurking hideous iceberg of absolute objection that Avon hadn’t even anticipated, no unshakable attachment to his body. No—none of that.

Blake straightened up. Paced. He’d loomed over Avon when he’d been particularly angry, just as his parallel counterpart had loomed over his own contemporary Avon in the alternate universe Avon had visited—some things, apparently, never changed. Blake brought a knuckle to his mouth, as he’d often done while thinking, and Avon felt his re-assumed body twitch with desperate nostalgia and the old, accustomed thread of lust.

Avon lounged behind controls for a teleport that in truth went nowhere, simply dressed in a black shirt and slacks (no need to remind Blake of what he’d looked like draped in leather and metal, with a gun in his hand—better to look like the old Avon, who Blake had worked with and trusted). Avon tried not to look as tense as he felt. 

“All right,” Blake said shortly. “How do we do it?”

Avon grinned broadly, relief and a sensation of having won coursing through his body. His recreated perceptions were really very good: Avon had never felt quite like this before, and yet the field of possibility governing his reactions encompassed this unlikely happening. The unprecedented turn of events gave him a visceral twist in his stomach and an accompanying soaring, giddy lightness in his chest. Avon felt the tension of the argument drain out of him, and suspected the same was true for Blake. Now that they’d decided on a course of action, they could move on from the preliminary disagreement. They always had been able to do that. They’d attacked Star One and responded to the ensuing crisis with admirable focus in the wake of possibly their worst fight.

“I’ll pull you through on my signal,” Avon said, trying to look appropriately grave about so serious and delicate an operation.

There were other curbs on his enthusiasm as well. Even as Avon had earlier watched his parallel counterpart entwined with a parallel Blake, getting what they’d both wanted, he hadn’t imagined it would happen for him. He couldn’t take Blake’s agreeing not to _die_ as anything like an engraved invitation to the man himself. There was no evidence whatever that his own Blake felt anything of that nature for him. If he ever had, time and Avon’s own actions had almost certainly disrupted it.

It would only have been a fragile combination of circumstances that could have won him Blake—almost a trick of the light. Because Avon knew what he was, and he knew what Blake was, and he’d spent more than enough time thinking about what Blake likely wanted and how little he matched that description for one lifetime.

“It should be simple enough,” he explained brusquely to keep his mind off any of the rest of it, “but you will have to endure an uncomfortable period where your consciousness isn’t embodied. Orac cannot place you _directly_ here, given that he’ll be pulling you out of the Federation’s systems. You may find that disquieting.”

Blake nodded sharply, bracing for it. “Now?”

“When better?” Avon stood, stepped out from behind the controls and extended his hand to Blake formally. With a roll of his eyes, Blake took it.

Avon guided him through into the unbodied, a little surprised to note that Blake, who had so often seemed above fear, _was_ afraid of this, just as Avon himself had been. Avon felt experienced and indulgent, assuring Blake that this was perfectly normal, was simply how it felt. He felt Blake’s flicker of annoyance at how patronizing he was being. Avon touched that feeling too, to soothe it away, to still the vibrating cord with the knowledge that he wasn’t taking the opportunity to show Blake up: that he had been frightened, in his turn.

It then occurred to Avon to wonder how either of them knew _any_ of this. Avon realized that Blake was _flowing into_ him and began to panic. This had _not_ been the deal. He scrabbled to wrench himself back, to be separate and himself and protected against intrusion. He almost slid free, but Blake clutched, sure that if Avon ripped himself away it might all go wrong. Avon—saw his point. Forced himself to be calm. He wouldn’t risk losing Blake over this. If they needed to be one stream of information for Blake to fully pull out of the Federation’s systems and into Orac, then they did. At any rate, they needed to go, _now_ , before they overloaded the Federation’s inadequate processing and storage equipment with the strain of housing the two of them and lost both their patterns.

There were certain things that Blake _couldn’t_ know—things Avon had no wish for him to see. But such a wish looked, increasingly, comically futile. What Avon wanted to conceal was too sprawling and too obvious. Blake wound tighter and tighter into him as they spooled through into Orac’s system, as the Federation team tried desperately to narrow the window through which the two of them could move. Clearly someone had realized they were losing data integrity, that something was going very wrong, that there would be hell to pay if they lost Blake’s mind. _A little late for that_ , Avon commented, and Blake thought that was a weak joke and that he’d missed Avon, _so_ much. Avon worked to keep his concentration, even as he longed to go chasing after that thought and hear more.

Then the moment (instantaneous and endless) of their combining fully came. They slipped through the clink and into the infinity of Orac, a space before and outside of forms. Their joining worked like interlacing fingers. Like chucking oil into vinegar and shaking them together, knowing that, with time, they’d separate again. For the moment they were one consciousness, but either of them would still have to go looking for information they wanted, if it didn’t suggest itself by association with what was happening in the present (just as either of them would have had to hunt a memory in his own mind).

 _And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep_ , Blake thought in him, surveying the unbodied. Helplessly Avon pressed deeper, wanting more of the peculiar combination of information and poetry that defined his lover. They were inside each other, and he adored Blake, so wasn’t that the word? The process and the combination had left Avon momentarily disoriented and giddy. Greedily he delved, and more of Blake welled up, came into him, to greet him. _And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness._ What is that, Avon wondered, what is that from? And he knew even as he wanted to know.

God, it was good to be Blake. To rest on his sound foundations and roll through his pleasure at having been reprieved from death. Avon had never had better sex than this. Every thought of Blake’s connected with himself came readily to his hand: Avon’s presence brought Avon to Blake’s mind. Avon had only to touch on the events of the moment, the rescue, to feel forgiveness, gratitude, grinding frustration (no surprise there), wonder, admiration and relief. All for him, as though addressed.

Unfortunately while he’d been distracted, Blake had been busy in him. A feeling like a low whistle rushed through Avon.

 _Well, what do we have here?_ Avon felt Blake think, and he flashed and spiked to see Blake twisting through Avon’s memory of Blake’s death. Luckily he'd not been paying attention to Avon's helpless exposure—unluckily, he'd not been paying attention because he'd been attracted by something more humiliating still. Of course that would draw him: the fresh guilt sat heavy on Avon’s conscience, and Blake must certainly be curious.

 _Put that down_ , Avon insisted and raged and begged and cried, though it _was_ his, Blake _did_ have a right to it. Had every right to it. Frustrated and futile, Avon pulsed like a black hole in anger, pulled away from their union. He snapped back when Blake twirled him around, as easily as Blake might turn one of his own curls around a finger.

 _Did I say I was finished with you?_ Blake asked mildly. _It’s all **very**_ _interesting, isn’t it?_

 _What is?_ Avon snapped, lightly singeing him with the tone.

 _This_ , Blake said, sifting through the wood-pile lot of it, a crazed bric-à-brac of sharp, disjointed, irrational thoughts. **_This_** _, in particular_. And Avon’s painful, raw, refined, mature, infantile, companionable, rational, lusting, wary, desperate, fascinated, devoted, mad, seething core of love for Blake slipped free of the rotting mass. It was wrapped, but that wouldn’t hold Blake for long. It pulsed with energy, like a heartbeat, and it must call to Blake like screaming.

 _Put that **back**_ , Avon hissed/whimpered as Blake started to unfold it—as yet Blake could hardly know what he was holding. Only that it ached, only that it wanted him. ‘I’ve never been so alone as I was when you left me’ whispered out of the mass as Blake untucked a layer of the thing like a demented pass-the-parcel. Tiers and tiers of the stuff, mille-feuille.

 _I can’t bear you looking at it_ , Avon couldn’t help telling Blake, here. But Blake, rapt, twitched off another layer (‘I didn’t really want to live, if you were dead—there didn’t seem to be a point’), obviously prepared to keep going. He seemed inexhaustibly patient. (‘When I think of my own name, I think of you saying it.’)

 _Fine_ , Avon seethed, _fine fine fine **fine**_. And in retaliation he ripped into Blake, prepared to go forward from the beginning even as Blake went backwards from the end.

But even Blake’s thin, first memories of him—before they’d known and meant anything much to each other—were so cathected in Blake’s memory and so suffused with Blake’s keen interest that Avon, fuelled by ripening suspicions, skipped forward to the present and found himself wading through a thick, swamping quagmire of feeling—chest deep in love. He slid around to catch the origin of it, holding onto those first threads of interest in one hand and walking carefully back from the present to find the fall. Early. Worse even than his own, in that regard.

Blake didn’t mind him being there. Practically propped the door open. Still, it was with immense smugness, and a resolution to fully examine all of that later, that Avon reported back to him.

 _I had you wrapped around my finger_ , Avon cooed. _‘From the very beginning’, didn’t you say? I could have had you on your knees, oh, any time_.

 _I wouldn’t talk, if I were you_ , Blake answered him, vibrating at a very compatible pitch of smugness himself. And what it was to feel it—to know miscommunication impossible, and the unvarnished truth so much to his liking. They settled into one another, Avon pushing hard, making Blake take him in at his core, making Blake’s pattern shiver around his and enfold him totally.

 _I want a body for this_ , Blake thought.

 _Mine or yours?_ Avon teased automatically.

 _False binary_ , Blake tsked. _One should lend itself to the other._ _Show me how to get back to the Liberator. At least the first time, let’s do this the traditional way. After all,_ he idly flicked through Avon’s fantasies, sending a rippling shudder through Avon’s mind, _we’ve both given it so much thought—_

 _It’d be a shame to waste the work,_ Avon agreed.

 _Mm,_ Blake agreed. _Where haven’t I had you on that ship, in my imagination?_

 _Well,_ Avon said, “exactly,” with his mouth. He was holding Blake’s hand again, standing in front of the teleport console. Just as they had been standing, moments and two years and a lifetime ago.

Blake shoved Avon against the wall of the pointless teleport bay, and Avon grinned as his back hit the panel. “You missed me terribly,” Avon mocked. Blake was on him, mouthing his neck, and Avon moaned and continued. “You want this so much you can barely finish a thought.” Avon watched the dazzling quick multitude of them flare and fizzle with satisfaction.

“Whereas I don’t even need to say how much you want me,” Blake responded, his even tone disdaining argument. “You and I both know it.”

And so they did—the exposure humiliated and thrilled Avon at once. Blake looked Avon in the eye and Avon held his gaze, tilting his chin up with defiance. They were both breathing heavily, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that they should melt into a kiss.

Blake took a step back, dragging Avon with him, still kissing him, refusing to let go. Blake fumbled blindly for the simulation’s copy of Avon’s tool kit, where it had often sat on the roller cart. He undid the catch and found the bio-safe coil-lubricant by the shape of the bottle, all without looking behind him. It was impressive and obvious evidence of a thoroughly-worked-through fantasy, and Avon smiled into Blake’s mouth as Blake pushed him back against the teleport wall once more.

“Shut up,” Blake said.

“I didn’t say anything,” Avon murmured, turning around so Blake could pull his trousers down, not bothering to remove his shirt. They had all the time in the world and beyond, and nevertheless a synergistic sense of urgency had built between them. They’d had more than enough foreplay when they’d combined their data streams—Avon wasn’t sure this fuck didn’t count as having seconds. Nor did they need to discuss positions at present. They knew what they felt like, and they happened, this once, to be in agreement.

Avon, his face pressed against the panel wall, shivered under Blake’s intent thoughts even as Blake’s fingers prepared him. Maybe they could have skipped these preliminaries, given the artificial environment, but Avon wouldn’t have wanted to. His breath caught as Blake’s cock finally pressed into him, and his hands, which he’d smacked flat against the wall above his head some minutes ago, tensed as his fingers arched, clawing at the metal. As Blake pushed deeper, one hand anchoring Avon’s hip, another came up to cover one of Avon’s hands, clenching it.

Avon made a thick, dumb, glottal sound in his throat as Blake slid his hand down Avon’s clothed back, until Blake had both Avon’s hips in his grip, and used this leverage to fuck Avon hard.

“You might be hurting me,” Avon said, intentionally prissy, grinning into the wall as Blake’s mind spasmed—Blake liked that edge of willful, petulant untouchability in him. When Avon was pristine and controlled, something in Blake _yearned_ to drag him through a mudflat.

“I am,” Blake said huskily into Avon’s ear between rough thrusts. “And you like it.”

Well, that was true enough. Blake was better than Avon’s fantasies of him—more enthusiastic, more unpredictable—he wasn’t hurtling them towards an orgasm, as Avon tended to do himself when indulging in self-gratification. Avon twitched under this more luxuriant stimulation. He was _b_ _igger_ than Avon had expected, to be honest, though Avon was trying to downplay that in his too-accessible mind. (Embarrassingly difficult to do, given that it _would_ keep occurring to him.) He squeezed himself around Blake with a sensation of pain and satiation and thought ‘ _Fuck,_ yes’ and ‘If he goes easy on me, I’ll kill him’. He wondered if he felt as good to Blake (wondered, luxuriously, what it felt like to _be_ his lover in body, as he had been in mind not long ago), and knew an instant’s childlike greed at being unable to take Blake this instant—a wild incomprehension of opportunity cost.

Now there was a thought. Without necessarily expecting it to work, Avon levered himself into Blake’s body, and neatly displaced Blake’s consciousness, sliding it into his own body. He gasped in surprise with Blake’s throat at having managed it—the sound itself surprising, his expression with Blake’s equipment. Avon rolled Blake’s shoulders and, with a quick tousle of his own hair (Blake’s hands were substantial and deft and more powerful than his own, and wielding them was a pleasure, his own hair so soft under Blake’s fingers), Avon gripped his own hips again and thrust.

“Oh god,” Blake said, taken by surprise, and Avon was uncomfortable with and turned on by the thin, whining, needy pitch of his own voice to Blake’s ears.

“Like that, Blake?” he asked, just to hear Blake’s voice, and shuddered a little at the rolling timbre of it, working through his body. At the way Blake’s voice sounded, employed in a lazy, insinuating register.

“Vain,” Blake hissed as Avon thrust into him again, Avon’s voice lending itself to the tone. “Enjoying fucking yourself? Not that I blame you.”

He was, but not quite in the way Blake had suggested. He did feel powerful. And he did love having Blake’s cock, apparently in any sense. Adrenaline pumped in Blake’s veins. It was like how Avon felt himself, taking a man, but Blake felt positively made to do this, fit-for-purpose designed for it. Blake was somewhat physically stronger than Avon. He had a different build. And even with access to Avon’s thoughts, he would have been wary of using that strength on Avon. He controlled himself with a lifetime’s experience of doing so—it was habitual now, and besides, he didn’t want to hurt Avon. But Avon, who better knew his capacities and what he liked, had no hesitation about hammering into Blake, thrusting jaggedly, bruisingly hard and deep, in a wrenchingly slow, absolute rhythm that made Blake curse with Avon’s voice and words Avon never would have used. And Blake pushed back against him, fighting for a rhythm, when Avon would have let himself be battered, would have sunk down into it luxuriously.

“Enjoying being taken?” Avon countered.

“This body’s tremendously eager for it,” Blake shot back, and Avon frowned at having given Blake that opening. But Blake continued, more seriously, “You’re so differently responsive—God, this is nothing like how it is for me. Is it different for you too? This side of it’s _good_ for me, when I’m _me_ , but this— _This_ is—”

Avon (in part to shut him up and in part because he was honestly curious) pushed Blake’s fingers against his own lips.

“You asked for it,” Blake murmured, his voice low (Avon wondered if he typically sounded quite so take-me-now, or if Blake was hamming it up), his lips moving interestingly against Avon’s assumed fingertips. And then Avon groaned as Blake sucked his own fingers, his hips spasming helplessly into Blake’s, his breath choking in his throat. Right. Hypothesis confirmed.

Avon wrenched his hand away just to regain control, and, breathing hard, fucked Blake with a vengeance, sucking hard at his own neck. He smirked as Blake discovered the extent of his susceptibility to that.

“Sorry,” Avon said when he broke off, not sounding it. “You _did_ want this the traditional way, the first time, and this is decidedly un.” Plus he’d made very free of Blake’s mind.

“Well,” Blake panted, “there’s traditional and there’s traditional. I also said ‘my body or yours’ was something of a false dichotomy—but I’ve always thought that, you, Avon, should be prepared to take what you dish out.” And with a sudden mental push Avon was slammed into himself, and Blake was slamming into _him_ , and Avon was in the ridiculous position of almost coming, cock untouched, and—surprised by the exchange and the sensation—screaming embarrassingly when Blake shoved all the way into him, drew far out, and slammed back.

“Fuck, please, fuck, Blake, fuck,” Avon babbled as Blake’s disjointed thoughts and plans washed over him, moving him more effectively than a hand on his cock could have done: _I could take him harder on the floor we could play around with body alteration when we’re comfortable with it god he’s tight I bet he hasn’t been with anyone since no he hasn’t why should he he loves me he’s mine and no one but him does it for me either I bet he’d take my whole fist I bet he’d love it he’s going to come for me just like this he’s so gorgeous like this god I love him but he knows that don’t you Avon?_

“Yes,” Avon almost sobbed, “yes, I—”

Blake never doubted for a second that he was well-beloved, because he couldn’t have missed that if he’d wanted to. He knew he didn’t need to say the same, but he clearly realized it would be a pleasure to tell Avon, a pleasure to speak the words, and so he did.

Then Blake didn’t think anything coherent—just warmth and tension and closer and tighter and a sharp shattering arrival of release that Avon could never have resisted. They slid to the floor exhausted, tangled up in one another, limbs loosely entwined, breathing hard, occasionally gathering themselves enough to give one another a distracted, open-mouthed kiss. Profound lassitude stole over the both of them, comingling with contentment, and though their consciousnesses weren’t intertwined, this felt like the physical equivalent.

***

Later Avon explained to Blake how temporality worked here: how out of sync they were with their native universe. They agreed they could afford each other time. A kind of honeymoon, Blake had said, with a trace of amusement and no irony whatsoever.

It was quiet, but Avon didn’t find the relative solitude disturbing. In a body (even an electronic construction of a body, housed inside an electronic construction of a spaceship), he needed sleep and food and like forms of satiation—simulacrums thereof, but even so. He supposed he could have dispensed with all that, if he tinkered with the degree to which his body required anything. But beyond the way he and Blake occasionally touched each other’s minds for comfort or for lusher satisfactions, Avon was reluctant to dispense with human limitations. Let him be a man with a body, in a world that recognized him as such. Let them enjoy each other as humans, sleeping together and eating together and all the rest. They had world enough and time to be diaphanous intelligences, in the wider universe.

Avon missed the texture of Blake’s voice when Blake simply thought at him. He missed the clinging associations and the colors of Blake’s thoughts when Blake only spoke. _Never happy, are you,_ Avon chid himself gently—but then Blake, too, mostly thought in complicated ambivalences, all shades and factors. It was something of a relief to Avon not to find his feelings misread, his love taken lightly or for disdain simply because he was never wholly positive in anything. Avon had sometimes thought this tendency in himself a mark of his inability to care for anyone properly, in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary. Evidence that showed that, if anything, he cared far too much, where he did care. Avon had sometimes feared that if anyone he valued could ever see this in him, they wouldn’t understand, and should think themselves slighted. But Blake understood all this intimately, understood Avon perfectly, now. In a way, he always had.

“Do you think you’ll come to regret the loss of your humanity?” Avon asked, because he felt he could ask Blake, now, about the things that most worried him. It was also, of course, useless to try and _hide_ his anxieties.

The two of them were sitting on the floor in front of the flight-deck couch with their legs stretched out, leaning their heads back against the soft padded seats—casual and intimate here as they never had been in life.

Blake snorted. “I didn’t really have a choice.” He had, after all, already died by the time Avon had offered him this. “Neither did you.”

“Answer properly,” Avon said, idly kicking him in the shin.

“Ow,” Blake said matter-of-factly.

“Do you imagine you will come to feel the absence of your original body as a degradation?” Avon asked again, rolling over and swinging a leg over Blake, arching an eyebrow, sitting on Blake’s lap and pressing their groins together. He smiled at the slight stirring he felt in his own—no doubt answered by a response in Blake’s. “Will you blame me, curse me?”

“I cursed you last night,” Blake reminded him.

“In,” Avon reminded _him_ , “a rather different context.”

“Nothing gold can stay,” Blake said, sliding a hand up Avon’s back, over the fabric of the silk shirt he wore—no jacket, now. What was the point? Nudity seemed ridiculous, but so too did wearing layers upon layers when Blake could strip open his mind with a thought, and when Avon wanted no protection from him. “Bodies tend to degrade as it is. You saw mine was looking rather worse for wear even before I lost it, while _you_ had the cheek to go on looking just the same.”

Avon laughed at that. “You must have been blind in both eyes—I looked like what I was: a man who hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in a year.”

“You looked like the man I’d waited years for,” Blake countered. “There can’t be anything more beautiful than that. No, I don’t believe I’ll ever think it a loss, because I haven’t _lost_ anything. Those are pearls that were his eyes; nothing of him that doth fade, but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange.”

Idly, Avon twisted a hand into Blake’s hair and a thought into his mind, fetching out the quote’s origin and meaning. He didn’t know earlier forms of English like Blake did (anything from before old-calendar 1800 was somewhat mysterious to him), and had trouble parsing the words. Blake meant to say that he thought himself both altered and unaltered. Transformed bizarrely, perhaps into something more enduring and better. Not diminished, if one was willing to be at all fair about the matter.

“I always thought you changed me like that,” Avon murmured. “I suppose I’m glad to have had a reciprocal effect.”

Blake rolled his eyes when Avon accompanied this declaration with another push against his body, deliberately spoiling the romanticism of it. “Yes,” Blake said crisply, “I can tell you like having an effect. We’ve done the flight deck already.” They were on a lazy sort of quest to have one another everywhere they’d separately fantasized about doing so.

“The couch,” Avon countered, “not the floor. _That_ is an entirely distinct idea.”

Blake laughed. “I’ve never heard a weaker argument!”

“You ought to try listening to your own some time.”

***

“I want Orac moved,” Blake said.

They did their planning as people—at the moment as people sitting in the Liberator’s rest room. There was no reason not to, since a human appraisal was as valuable as the detached, expansive perspective the unbodied offered. Blake found it easier to focus like this, though he admitted that practice could and very probably would accustom him to his disembodied form.

“Reason?” Avon asked

“Isn’t it obvious?” Blake asked in turn, surprised. “The bodies of your crew are on GP, as are the remains of your ship. You say Servalan’s alive—she’s eventually going to think to run a scan for Orac’s components, and he’s hardly been inactive. He must be emitting power signatures of some kind. Or any random person or animal could stumble across it.”

“I wasn’t thinking,” Avon admitted, somewhat crossly, because he hadn’t been, either while dying or while distracted by what he essentially had to term post-nuptial bliss. He took Blake’s point. They _did_ had to act to prevent the Federation from obtaining Orac—not least because whatever the Federation did with the device might damage the two of them. They didn’t entirely know how their continued existence was connected to this permutation of the device. Even Orac couldn’t answer that.

“All right, I agree.”

“The only question is how to manage it,” Blake said, thinking aloud. “We could transmit a message to an independent operative—I’m sure you could rig up computerized credits to pay them.”

“Relying on other people is always dangerous,” Avon reminded him. “Even when whatever you need them to do doesn’t involve a supercomputer worth a hundred million credits capable of doing immense damage to the work you gave your life for, upon which our continued existences may also depend.”

Blake exhaled. “Someone political might be more trustworthy,” he volunteered.

“They _might,_ ” Avon gave him. “But then do you have any confirmed rebels left on this world? Can we contact them in a secure manner? Can they arrive in good time? Would one of your committed rebels willingly stash a thing like Orac and not touch it? And if you’ve no objections to the surviving rebels taking Orac, are you certain that _that_ is what you want to do with Orac’s physical form, and with your work—which I naturally understand you have no intention of giving up simply due to the slight inconvenience of having died?”

“I’m not sure yet,” Blake admitted, sighing and sitting back in his chair. “You’re right. First things first. We need to focus on getting Orac to a secure location, where he can’t be actively taken advantage of by the Federation. Then we’ll start worrying about the rest.”

“We?” Avon groused for form’s sake.

“You’d do anything for me,” Blake pointed out reasonably. “You’re even looking forward to the challenge. You came to me almost glad to take my direction again in a _professional_ sense. You felt you’d stagnated in my absence.”

“Of course you went looking for that,” Avon said, rolling his eyes.

“It was rather near the surface,” Blake observed politely. And insufferably.

“The fact remains,” Avon pointedly changed the subject, “that I have never found a better way of seeing something done than doing it oneself. Unfortunately, that option is unavailable to us at present.”

“Is it really?” Blake asked, seeming to actually mean the interrogatory. It looked as though something had occurred to him. “Avon,” he asked slowly, “just how cybernetic _is_ a mutoid?”

“Now that is a _very_ interesting question,” Avon breathed, sitting up with sudden interest. “Let’s find out.”

***

It was important not to make Orac’s location obvious _because_ they’d moved him. Blake and Avon had to work out how to stage an accident that made it look as though a whole shipment of mutoids (the Federation was deploying them to GP as part of the re-legalizing program) had been destroyed. Thus the absence of the one they were working with wouldn’t be exceptional, and followed up on.

Staging the necessary accident involved long debates between Avon and Blake. Could you destroy mutoid programming and leave the people it had been imposed upon whole? Were there personalities left under that programming, or was there even the possibility of building fresh ones? Were there good enough records of who these people had been to reconstruct anything from them? Was it even a kindness to restore personalities if you could, given these people’s altered forms, dependence on blood serum and the fact that they stuck out like sore thumbs and could hide from the Federation precisely nowhere? Would mutoids go feral if unleashed from their programing and hunt the blood they needed to live, like vampires out of old legends? Blake didn’t think Avon would be quite so fatalistic about these questions if it were _him_ they’d modified. Avon—had to admit that if the Federation had done that to Blake, he’d be working desperately hard, unable to accept the conclusions that at present seemed obvious to him. He considered the matter again, thinking more carefully this time.

They settled on a minimum-casualty approach, and even as Avon had meant everything he’d said, he’d also felt it as a positive pleasure to argue with Blake again.

 _I didn’t know you liked that_ , Blake thought, amused. He was hardly able, in the unbodied, to avoid seeing the way Avon’s pattern pulsed and glowed and swirled with energy as they conversed.

 _Shut up_ , Avon drawled, dimming the light—tidying up his fondness. _And **don’t**_ _say ‘I’m not_ _even talking.’_

From the unbodied, Avon could slide an extension of himself into his chosen mutoid. Not his whole pattern—it was too large for the mutoid’s cybernetic processing elements. But that extension _should_ be enough to control the cyborg. Now then: how did it go?

It took a surprisingly long time to figure out how to lift a limb, but Avon was patient with it. He, rather than Blake, was doing this, because he knew more about computer-architecture. The arrangement of the mutoid’s ‘controls’ was thus more intuitive to him. Eventually Avon had sufficient dominion over the whole of the system to get the mutoid to walk to Orac’s physical manifestation (and when he’d arrived at it, there had been his own body to dispose of— _that_ had been an uncanny experience), to pick up the computer and to carry it to a shielded bunker Blake had told him about. Dry and quiet and hidden away.

He twitched a tarp over Orac—Avon was settled deeply enough into the mutoid now that saying ‘he’ felt natural, though the body happened to be female. He sealed off the bunker, and nearly shot back into the unbodied when he felt ( _felt!_ ) a tap on his shoulder. Another mutoid, smiling at him. In a rather familiar way.

“ _Blake_ ,” Avon seethed in a strange woman’s voice. “How?”

“I watched you.” Blake shrugged, the familiar gesture sitting strangely on the delicate shoulders of the thin, distinctly pretty man who’d been modified clumsily into a soldier. Some society dandy who’d embarrassed his family once too often, perhaps. “And there _was_ a whole cadre of them available. Need any help?”

“Obviously _not_ ,” Avon muttered.

“Don’t sulk. Both of us knowing how to do this could be useful—it can’t hurt, at any rate.”

“True, but that isn’t why you did it. I was exposing myself to risk—” they didn’t know, if they were killed while in these satellite bodies, whether they’d be able to pull their patterns out in time, “—and you couldn’t stand ordering anyone to do anything _you_ weren’t willing to do.”

“Not _anyone_ ,” Blake corrected him, “you.”

Avon rolled someone else’s eyes. The trouble with Blake knowing, now, exactly how susceptible Avon was to that sort of romantic nonsense was that all Blake had to do to get his way was to say something ridiculous and mean it. Avon went dazed and stupid and _compliant_ , and Blake could waltz in and do whatever he liked.

“Get rid of it somewhere else,” Avon instructed. “It won’t do for them to find both of these together.”

“ _Really?_ ” Blake said with mock surprise. “No, not just yet.” And slender fingers, Blake’s and not Blake’s, turned the face Avon was using towards the face he was. Despite the interference and encumbrances of modifying metals, cold lips deprived of warm blood kissed in the world.

Avon knew Blake was taking all this seriously—that Blake knew they were essentially puppeteering corpses, and that he certainly cared, probably a good deal more than Avon himself did. But then Blake had always set his jaw and tried to make the best of a bad situation. He had kept, to some extent, his good humor even in the face of the worst the Federation could throw at him. And so Blake wasn’t going to deny either of them what scraps of enjoyment they could wrest from their absurd position. He certainly wasn’t going to let their first (and possibly, depending on how this went, also their last) opportunity to kiss in the flesh go to waste. Even if the flesh they were in at the moment was someone else’s.

“Cheek,” Avon commented as he was released.

“Lips,” Blake corrected. “Careful, Avon. You’re forgetting how bodies work already.” With a wink that looked especially rakish on that young, debauched face, Blake turned and walked away, intending to leave his mutoid wiped and deactivated somewhere isolated in the forest.

Decidedly, Avon wasn’t forgetting bodily matters. He used the mutoid to see to the corpse of the Scorpio, salvaging the remnants of Slave, the teleport system and the Plaxton drive, and seeing them stored in a bunker much like the one Orac was in. The bunkers had been emergency shelters or something of the kind, once: built by settlers ad-hoc after the planet was declared open. According to Blake, the only people who knew the location of these particular bunkers were dead, now, and of these only he was available for comment.

Avon also saw to the bodies of his former comrades—a grim duty he’d wanted to accomplish alone. They’d been tossed in an open pit by the Federation. Perhaps it was sentimental and pointless, but Avon felt strongly that they could and should be given marked burial somewhere undisturbed. If Avon couldn’t do that with his own hands, he would do it with someone else’s. It was difficult to work out how to leverage the grav-shovel with the mutoid’s tireless but shorter body, but in a way Avon welcomed the difficulty. It felt appropriate.

Avon found, via Federation transmission chatter piped to the mutoid, that Blake had seen to his own corpse before meeting up with Avon (it had gone missing, and the already-disgraced tech team was frantic). This relieved Avon, who had thought liberating and decently disposing of Blake’s body necessary, but had dreaded doing it. Blake must have known that, which meant that his interference had been not a show of mistrust, but an act of kindness Avon felt deeply.

When Avon had finished burying the dead, he wiped and dropped his mutoid in a random location. He slipped back into the unbodied, touched Blake briefly in passing, and went to order android duplicates from the Federation facility that had replicated Avalon—in the Federation’s name, of course. The order looked legitimate enough to fool the manufacturers, and he and Blake would steal the androids when the time came. If they were going to do more of this,for several reasons it would be convenient for them to have access to something like their own forms.

 _They could come in useful_ , he commented when Blake came to see what he was doing. Avon liked the way Blake checked in on him—Blake’s pattern sinking into his just a little, as though the other man were coming up behind him and resting his hands on Avon’s shoulders, looking at his console.

 _Good thinking_ , Blake said, traces of amusement, appreciation for Avon’s cleverness and anticipatory thoughtfulness curling through him. Avon’s pattern curled back into Blake’s in automatic response. He couldn’t really hide how much he loved Blake, in the unbodied. He didn’t really see much point in trying. He hadn’t the medium of a body to do it with or any such barrier to hide behind. There was just the stuff of him, and that reacted to Blake without his volition. They twisted together briefly, then unclasped.

 _Well now_ , Avon wondered to Blake, _what next?_

***

Blake had been interested in Avon’s account of his initial sojourn to a parallel universe—how Avon had decided to tell that alternate Blake the location of Star One, to warn him about the Andromedan incursion, to declare his own loyalty (or rather that of the Avon native to that universe), and to leave the rest in Blake’s hands, trusting to his judgment. Blake had been touched, truth be told. But characteristically, he thought bigger than Avon. He pointed out the staggering number of branch universes that must exist. Blake wanted to devise an algorithm (like a justice computer, but a more sophisticated) and a specific mechanism of judgment that would assess where the kind of message Avon had left for the other Blake would help. If they themselves were now computerized patterns, then theoretically it should be possible to design a program that would apply exactly the criteria they would in order to determine that. Blake then wanted to send the message to any parallel universe it seemed likely to benefit. Then they would watch how their changes played out in these universes, and help further where they could.

Orac determined that it was impossible to loop back and interfere earlier in a timeline you’d already materially intervened in—once you’d made yourself part of a given universe’s chain of events, you were stuck with the consequences of what you’d done. This gave them pause. Both Blake and Avon were hesitant to experiment with universes on a grand scale, to treat one of them as a petri dish in order to try and stop the Federation’s abuses from the moment Orac had begun to exist in that universe. Starting small, doing things they very well could have done and seeing what they learned, was rather different than choosing to sacrifice a few worlds, giving them over to a series of invasive operations that amounted to a vivisection in the hope of engineering a better outcome for the rest.

Avon had sometimes mocked Blake for thinking he was god, but he’d also always known that accusation was far from true. If anything, Blake was sometimes over-modest about his own individual importance, and hesitant to fully exert his personal influence. He was similarly hesitant to over-reach himself here. Such experiments might be beneficial overall, but Blake couldn’t bring himself to run tests—to potentially sacrifice a few branch universes to benefit all the other permutations. Who was he to make that choice?

Without thought, now, Blake brushed against Avon for reassurance, to be steadied in himself as he worked out what he was doing with the branch universes. In the unbodied, Avon always felt Blake’s flashes of need and want for him and answered immediately, yielding the cool slick surface and the lush warm interior of his mind. Avon was pleased and a little flattered that Blake looked to him as often as he did. In the unbodied Blake wanted to dwell in him for long periods, laying in and over his pattern, and he slipped apart with satisfaction. These joinings were and weren’t sex—they were both too frequent and casual and too profound to entirely overlap with what the two of them did with their simulacra bodies, when they took them up. There were forms and variations within the range of ‘touches’ here, as well—a brush was not a complete comingling, and neither of these was the full press of their distinct patterns into one another’s. The last Avon thought of as something like how Blake sometimes stayed inside him after fucking him—but impossibly fuller, longer and sweeter, even as it missed out on the sticky satiation, the stretched satisfaction, the indolent pride of still dripping with Blake. It was like the _idea_ of that gesture.

Blake made Avon tell him everything he’d done and learned while they were apart. Blake was under the impression that Avon had been too quick to dismiss his experience as valueless. Blake liked the Plaxton drive and the warlord alliance, the Mellanbys and the salvation of Teal and Vandor from a conflict that would have ripped them apart and left these empires’ carcasses exposed to Servalan’s vulture-talons. They could do something with all that, and make use of more of Avon’s experiences besides. Even warnings about what _not_ to do might well be of use. Blake wouldn’t have made precisely Avon’s mistakes, but he’d certainly made his own, and he agreed with Avon that all knowledge was valuable.

 _You know so much more than you think you do_ , Blake observed, surprised at Avon’s internal self-deprecation and keenly interested in what he was looking at—both the content and the quirky, efficient perceptual system by which Avon organized all this. _I would be lost in this without you._

With full access to Blake’s feelings, and knowing that Blake had similar insight into his own, it was difficult not to believe that Blake meant that, and that his opinion was considered. Avon had lost trust in himself, but it seemed that Blake still trusted his judgment, even after having witnessed Avon’s most profound failure in that regard. Blake’s trust bolstered Avon, more than anything else could have done.

***

Only Servalan knew about Orac’s existence. She’d never told the wider Federation administration how badly she’d bungled there (Ven Glynd had uncovered her attempt to defraud the Federation in order to purchase the machine, but she’d had him silenced for his efforts). Even if Servalan had been willing to throw herself on her own sword for the good of the government in this case (not likely), eliminating tarrial cells from all computers within the Federation would not only have been exorbitantly costly and technologically challenging, it would also have been impossible to arrange without the use of at-risk, tarrial computers. Orac would have been able to detect the shift, and would probably have been able to act to sabotage it. Still: Servalan was a dangerous, murderous lunatic, and she knew about Orac. And ‘no risk whatsoever’ was infinitely preferable to even the slightest chance of discovery and opposition.

Thus killing her wasn’t just an act of petty vengeance, Avon argued, not at all sure he wasn’t abusing Blake’s trust in his judgment by doing so (because he would certainly appreciate his revenge). But at least Blake knew that, now. Avon’s doubts were visible to him. It wasn’t like the situation with Travis, in which Avon had felt obliged to pretend objectivity despite being, he felt, blatantly compromised by his hatred for a man who’d wanted, personally and intimately, to kill Blake.

Pointless in the end, Avon thought wryly. After all, he himself had ended up achieving Travis’s goal.

 _Don’t be morbid_ , Blake thought, with a rather more direct address. _You’re nothing alike, and you know it_.

In it was a matter-of-fact acknowledgement that Avon had seen considerable action, balanced against Blake’s awareness of the high civilian casualties of Travis’ ruthless campaigns. Next to _that_ , Avon was as innocent as a babe in arms. Blake was right: maudlin recrimation was pointless and self-indulgent, and they’d work to do. (Avon found he was far busier, now that he was dead.)

Avon carefully stage-managed Servalan’s murder. She was visibly shocked to see him (or rather, though she didn’t know it, to see a near-exact android replica of him), having heard much about what had transpired at Gauda Prime from the fragmentary evidence of her subordinates. She was even more shocked by Avon’s mocking insinuation that Blake was similarly alive and well. And most shocked of all to actually die: as though she’d never _really_ expected to.

Of course Avon saw the surveillance records wiped, and of course a meticulous data-recovery team would reconstruct them, only to be in turn surprised to learn Sleer’s true identity from the conversation. Avon could have done a more thorough job with the wipe, but that was hardly the point. The assassination was more than just an assassination—he and Blake were announcing (believably covertly) that they still lived.

After it was done, Avon teleported up from the resort planet Servalan had been staying on, back to their new and newly-liberated DSV (and an anxious, pacing Blake).

The technology that had enabled Avon to execute Servalan (stealing another ship from the System, for one) had taken some doing to acquire. But this had actually been the least challenging and important component of their activities thus far.

Blake had always thought liberating Earth essential, and now both the destruction of Star One and the new capabilities that working through Orac afforded them had enabled him to focus on doing so. Paralyzing the military and arming the rebels were their other major aims, enabling the glasnost and perestroika they’d ushered in on the core worlds to come to anything other than a swift end under brutal suppression.

This three-pronged approach did require time, physical access to some closed systems, and a mastery over Orac’s capabilities they could never have wielded from outside its systems. The information Orac provided via its interface was often misleading. Blake and Avon had long ago concluded that it was unwise to rely on the computer for anything that required a reasoned assessment of a situation. The computer’s methodology was far too idiosyncratic, often deliberately so. Though from the inside, Avon had a new, grudging degree of sympathy for Orac on this point. It was clearer to him now both how different Orac’s consciousness was from he and Blake’s patterns (and thus why the decisions it reached could be so startlingly different from their own) and how difficult it was to convey the sort of data streams it dealt in via human language. But combining their priorities and judgments with Orac’s processing capabilities now offered them opportunities that, if not limitless, at least had yet to show their limits.

And so they were in the process of staging a largely peaceful revolt from within the Federation. Pacification drug manufacture and distribution were going to hell as job-allocation systems spat out seemingly-legitimate work-orders for maintenance that was actually targeted sabotage. Justice machines were refusing to process incorrect information. They were overturning old convictions insistently and beginning to liaise, seemingly of their own will, with military computers and the like: they'd begun to know more than they ought, to reject falsified reports and to request further data. The evaluation system Blake had developed to make determinations about parallel universes, which Avon referred to as ‘Blake in a box’, was taking over the justice machines like a virus. New machines brought in to replace the stubborn equipment corrupted fast. There was talk of the rebels having done this; talk of going back to hand-adjucating everything; talk of juries, which was laughable and antediluvian and _actually impossible_ now that suppressants were failing on a large scale and everyone was asking awkward questions, as though each citizen was a malfunctioning, stirring justice machine.

The financial collapse, when it came, looked eerily familiar. What was left of core Central Security was starting to feel uncomfortably implicated, because running and prosecuting Kerr Avon had been their racket. Now his override code had been repurposed, and this worm was writhing through every central bank transaction refusing to dispense military salaries, recognize private debts, respect grade-based pay gaps, or _stop_ paying out to citizen’s accounts, redistributing wealth seemingly at random.

Unfortunately this was the _least_ of Central Security’s problems. Because propaganda wasn’t uploading. The now-undrugged population would have been too restless to properly appreciate even if it was. All the careful information blocks that had kept citizens of core worlds thinking they were essentially living under a sane government were melting away. Records spilled everywhere. People opened their messages and saw instead military secrets, Central Security’s record on _them_ , prohibited information about the outer worlds, banned cultural data, reports on rebel activity or random gibberish. There was something in there to annoy everyone, even the people most determined to keep their heads down and see normalcy restored. Information had begun to flow as it had never done before, enabled to move by the computers the Federation was entirely reliant on. The Federation had discovered that these same machines were treacherous, capable of storing and yielding too _much_ information in a manner that a limited and specific paper archive never could have.

Meanwhile the military could no more trust its own orders than civilian workers could. Pylene 50 manufacturing plants would only spit out the antidote. Manufacturing new mutoids had become nearly impossible, and ships’ computers (so absolutely vital to the business of policing and controlling the outer worlds) were now a lost cause, failing mid-flight more often than not. Military-grade suppressants had also been tampered with, and desertion had risen to such rates that shooting the guilty became unfeasible.

In obtaining the DSV they’d used in Servalan’s assassination, Blake and Avon had also taken the System offline (Orac having shown neatly once before that the System could be fought and overpowered, and that it was up to the challenge). Once they’d freed the slaves servicing it, Blake and Avon had claimed the System’s Deep Space Vehicles as salvage. After finishing with Servalan, they'd used System pilots under their control (which functioned very like mutoids) to bring these resources to Avalon. All the pilots were ‘empty’, now—generations of them had been bred for the sole purpose of serving the System, and when it collapsed, so had they. It seemed they had no independent consciousnesses: the System had not found it convenient to engineer its servitors with fully-developed minds that might chafe under its control.

Blake and Avon had reserved a single ship for themselves. Blake, wearing an android body and pretending not to be a dead man, went down to the surface to present the gifts to Avalon, establishing himself as hard at work perpetrating some of the many changes in the air. He and Avon had agreed that it might be useful to them to be thought unchanged, as well as important for the rebellion’s own propaganda. By now, between their appearance at Avalon’s base, the whispers every time something went wrong, and the rumors the data-recovery technicians had leaked about Servalan’s real death, the two of them were at the center of a swirling miasma of gossip, working in their favor.

Blake had teleported back up from Avalon’s base looking amused.

“What is it?” Avon asked, waiting in his android. Inhabiting these mechanical bodies felt somewhat less real than inhabiting their simulated bodies within Orac did, but not disconcertingly so, anymore.

“Avalon made a pass at me,” Blake laughed, touching Avon’s mind to share the joke. He found the suggestion fairly hilarious, given how _very_ involved with Avon he was—more than the poor woman could have imagined.

Avon noted that Blake was caught out by the slight crunch of Avon’s mind—jealous, even though he knew it was ridiculous. He let Blake kiss him soundly, and ultimately, the body was enough like Avon’s own to respond with satisfying familiarity.

“You _really_ don’t have anything to worry about. I was too absorbed with you to even consider anyone else _long_ before I knew the feeling was mutual.”

Avon forced the snap of jealousy to ease away. Yes, he did know. He could feel it. He changed the subject to something he’d been wondering about in Blake’s absence. It was uncomfortable, now, not to have constant and immediate access to Blake: not to be able to unfold something to Blake even as it unfolded in his own mind, more swiftly even than he could speak the words.

“Do you intend to continue monitoring the situation after you’ve won?” Avon asked.

Blake shrugged. “I have to. It’s the only responsible thing to do. The transition’s not going to be easy—we won’t have _won_ until it’s over.”

Avon walked onto the flight deck and set the ship in motion. Blake followed him, sitting down on the couch.

“The casualties have been remarkably low, thus far,” Blake observed, exhaling. “I want to try and keep it that way.”

Avon joined him there, crossing his arms over his chest. Obviously that was true—Blake only said it because he was thinking it, and the line between thought and articulation had become rather blurred for them.

“When,” Avon asked without heat, “does interfering in this world become paternalism? An inability to let it go, to let the living make their own choices and mistakes?”

Blake shook his head, honestly considering it. “I don’t know. When does letting people get hurt become—acceptable? I _hope_ there will come a time when we _do_ know. When it’s clear to both of us that we’ve done enough.”

“Will you ever feel that way?”

Blake shrugged. “Touche. But then I never even particularly wanted to be President. And this is rather more power, in its way.”

“No,” Avon admitted, “you didn’t. I admit, that did surprise me at the time. It was obvious to me that you’d _have_ to be.”

Blake shook his head. “I don’t want that responsibility. I’ve done enough, gone through enough. I want things to be _right_ , but not to spend my days _making_ them right, forever. I want a private life. I want _us_ to have a private life, together.”

Avon smiled, looking away from him. “There was a time when I suspect I would have given my right arm to hear you say that. Now I have it for nothing. Well—for my death, and all the work we’ve done, and everything we’ve yet to accomplish, but probably will, given time. A small price to pay, really.”

Avon’s smile took on a more private aspect. “I used to entertain a fantasy wherein it was just the two of us on the Liberator. But then, as now, we had other commitments.” Avon held up the pale hand of ‘his’ android, studying it—his own skin tone, almost. Blake said it was slightly different, lacking its true, almost translucent quality over the blue veins at his wrists, but Avon couldn’t see it. “Should we just live as people again, in these? Do we need to? Do we owe your rebellion your Presidency?”

“No,” Blake said. He paused, then added, “God, I hope not. Besides, it might well become apparent, if we expose ourselves too far, that we’re not quite what we appear to be. Imagine the scandal and panic, the damage to the new government a revelation like that would cause. People wouldn’t understand. No, it’s too great a risk to take.”

“There is also the chance that we might die in these,” Avon reminded him. Avon had checked up on this since they’d first hijacked a mutoid. The chance was slight, given that they could almost certainly escape to the unbodied in time, but not nil (whereas within Orac, they were effectively immortal). Avon liked a plan idiot-proof, and having lost Blake once, he had no desire to do so again.

Blake nodded. “Having bodies—Well, I won’t speak ill of the experience, but we managed to fuck it up royally, didn’t we? Like this I can’t hide any information from you—and you can’t conceal any feeling from me. We manage better, now.”

Avon grinned at him. “We make excellent ghosts. ‘You said I killed you—haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe.’”

Blake laughed at him. “God, is that—?” He checked Avon’s mind. “ _Christ_ , I might have known. Of _course_ you bloody loved that at fourteen. Come here, you embarrassing thing.”

Blake sought contact, protection against the threat of the outside world and its demands that their conversation had suggested. Without access to Blake’s mind, Avon would never have known that Blake needed reassurance. He’d thought Blake invincible, and so hadn’t taken proper care of him. Now, however, Avon opened in turn, pushing over _‘He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.’_ to watch Blake groan with exasperation and like it, like him, far more than he ought to.

***

They’d interfaced with the ship’s computer and sent their new DSV (which Blake called Liberator Mark II and Avon, still vastly ashamed and angry with himself about having ruined the original, and slightly resentful of Blake’s attempt to make that better by doggedly not blaming him for it, did _not_ ) to an unpopulated, remote world until they needed it. Blake wanted to take a walk, and so they did. Avon wanted to lie down under the glow of the sun and feel heat on skin that would never burn, and so they did. Blake wanted to fuck here on the bank of a river, and so they did, relishing the small discomforts and the raw luxury of the lush, mossy, grassy, flower-laced, pillowing ground. Avon had never once, while he was alive, had sex outside. It seemed to him a particularly Blakish thing to want. That particularity appealed to Avon, and Blake’s pleasure at debauching neat, fastidious Avon in a forest was similarly winning.

Afterwards they lay next to each other, and Avon carded what was, for the moment, his hand through the grass, catching dew on his fingers. Blake looked especially handsome in this setting, in this light. Though this was only an android duplicate of Blake’s original body, that didn’t feel incorrect to think, somehow.

Blake moved his attractive, mobile lips to breathe out a low sigh. “Eventually they’ll phase out tarrial cells,” he said. Technology dated. Something better would come along, and that would render them less scope for intervention in the world. It could be a sort of natural twilight for them.

Avon considered the proposed retirement. “We’ll need to find a few sure-fire ways to jump off Orac before that happens. Some bolt-holes. We won’t be caught out by it.”

Avon listened to the sound of the river. Another thing he’d never particularly noted, in the almost forty years he’d been alive.

Blake’s voice drifted to Avon, warm and more content than Avon could ever remember it having sounded before. He’d been angry—all the time Avon had known him, Blake had been, under everything, desperate and afraid and angry. He wasn’t, now.

“And then we’ll find new things to do—new worlds to explore.”

Avon pushed the thought _I always wanted this for us_ to Blake, where it met with an almost perfect counterpart—the difference lying in that it was shaped and colored like a Blake-thought, rather than like one of his own. Sometimes he and Blake bled into one another, and sometimes they were very distinct people. Each state was sweeter for the other’s possibility.

“Do you think we’ll grow bored?” Avon asked idly, aware that this was something he’d both worried about and been reassured about before. Aware, also, that he could ask for and have infinite reassurance from Blake. That when he asked the question again, the shape of it was slightly different, and thus the answer told him something new.

“Perhaps one day we’ll want to die, and if we do, then we can—you and I, together.” Even that sounded sweet to Avon. Like a thing he could love. “But who knows?” Blake continued. “I think it’s more likely that we’ll just remain ourselves in _some_ sense, but continue to mature—become more than we are now. There’s time and scope enough for that. And there are infinite possibilities to explore. I’ve never wanted anything for myself like I want you, and this.”

Avon smiled at the canopy of trees and didn’t need to touch him. It was enough to feel Blake there, a hand’s distance away, breathing unnecessarily and _present_ and his own. To know that if he stretched out his hand, he’d find Blake’s, and could ask for anything and be given it.

Avon suspected he’d be better at adjusting to this form, and that Blake would be better at keeping them people. That together, they were quite well-positioned to get on. Avon couldn’t imagine a point, a thousand years from now, when Blake would be utterly apathetic about people suffering, or when he himself would be similarly indifferent to Blake. They would go on finding new ways to be themselves.

They could come to love one another differently, and more totally, in time. They thought it likely: a vegetable love growing vaster than empires, and more slow. And every possibility of rupture or souring that suggested itself to Avon seemed comic, when he considered it in context with knowing Blake’s mind as he did now. This was enough. It was so much more than enough, and it would come to be more still. As close to ‘always’ as the mind could conceive, and then beyond the boundary.

**Author's Note:**

> The stuff about platform change there at the end might come a bit from Ted Chiang's "The Lifecycle of Software Objects".
> 
> I think this is all the quotes:  
> Sea Change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel%27s_Song  
> Wuthering Heights: https://www.ucm.es/data/cont/docs/119-2014-04-09-Wuthering%20Heights.pdf  
> Genesis 1.2: http://biblehub.com/kjv/genesis/1.htm  
> To His Coy Mistress: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44688
> 
> You may find being able to understand Bronte but not Shakespeare implausible, but personally I find Shakespeare fairly clear and Chaucer almost entirely incomprehensible. That's also a 200 year jump, so I think that's a rather fair assessment of future linguistic drift? :/ They do talk like people who would understand Bronte, Austen, Dickens, et al, but not _necessarily_ like people who would understand Shakespeare. I mean it's been like, a millennia, and in an SFnal sense their English should probably bear as much resemblance to ours as ours does to Anglo-Saxon (maybe there are mitigating circumstances here, but). So I think 'no longer easily understanding Shakespeare without a specialist interest, even if a contemporary person positioned comparably would' makes sense here.


End file.
